Chapter 7 — Exercises

Color is learned by hunting it in the world and by training your eye to name what it sees. Most of these exercises send you out to shoot; several ask you to read a Described Photograph or fix a broken one. A phone is a perfect camera for every one of them — color is the great equalizer. Difficulty is marked ⭐ (warm-up), ⭐⭐ (core), ⭐⭐⭐ (stretch). Do the starred and odd-numbered ones at minimum; model answers and critiques for those live in the book's Answers to Selected Exercises. Before any shoot, turn off your phone's "auto enhance" — it will fight every color decision you make.

A quick reminder of the vocabulary you'll use throughout: hue (the color's name), saturation (its intensity), value (its brightness), the four harmonies (complementary, analogous, triadic, monochromatic), color contrast, and the dominant-hue image.

Part A — The three dimensions (Eye Training)

Exercise 7.1 ⭐ — Name three numbers. Find ten colored objects around you. For each, say its three dimensions in plain words: the hue (its name), whether the saturation is high, medium, or low (intense vs. greyish), and whether the value is light, medium, or dark. Example: "the mug — blue hue, low saturation, dark value." Speed and fluency are the goal, not precision.

Exercise 7.2 ⭐ — Squint to see value. Pick any colorful scene and squint hard until detail blurs and you see mostly light and dark. What you're now seeing is value, stripped of hue. Note two pairs of different hues that have the same value (a red and a green, say, that go equally grey when you squint). This is the merge that kills weak black-and-white conversions — you'll meet it again in Chapter 8.

Exercise 7.3 ⭐⭐ — One subject, three saturations. Photograph one colorful subject three ways to change only its saturation: once in direct sun (most saturated), once in open shade or overcast (naturally desaturated), and once backlit or slightly overexposed (washed toward white). Same hue throughout. Lay the three side by side and write one sentence on how the feeling changed with saturation alone.

Exercise 7.4 ⭐⭐⭐ — Diagnose the dimension. Find five of your own photos you find disappointing on color. For each, decide which one of the three dimensions is the real problem: wrong/clashing hue relationship, too-loud or too-flat saturation, or merged/muddy value. Resist the reflex answer "needs more saturation." Write the actual diagnosis and the re-shoot or edit that would fix it.

Part B — Harmonies (Shoot This)

Exercise 7.5 ⭐ — Find a complementary pair. Spend twenty minutes looking only for two complementary colors meeting in the world — orange against blue, yellow against violet, red against cyan/green. The planet offers them constantly (a warm subject at dusk). Make three photographs of complementary pairs you found. Don't build them; find them.

Exercise 7.6 ⭐⭐ — The dominant-plus-accent complementary. Now build one deliberately. Find a large field of one hue (a wall, the sky, a road, foliage) and place a small accent of its complement in it — a person, an object, a sign. The rule: the dominant hue should own most of the frame and the accent should be small. Shoot 15, keep the best, and state why the proportion (not 50/50) matters.

Exercise 7.7 ⭐⭐ — An analogous scene. Find and photograph a scene whose colors all live in one slice of the wheel — an autumn palette (yellows, oranges, reds), a seascape (blues, teals, greens), a desert or brick palette (ochres, tans, rusts). Frame to exclude any stray opposite hue that would break the calm. Caption it with the three or four neighboring hues present.

Exercise 7.8 ⭐⭐⭐ — Hunt a triadic frame. Triadic harmony (three evenly spaced hues — red/yellow/blue or orange/green/violet) is hardest to find in nature, so go to the made world: a market, a playground, painted buildings, signage. Make one photograph with three roughly-equal-spacing hues present, then deliberately let one of the three dominate so it doesn't become chaos. Explain which you let lead and why.

Exercise 7.9 ⭐⭐ — A monochromatic study. Make a photograph that lives almost entirely in one hue across a wide range of value and saturation — all blues from ice to navy, all warm browns, all greens. Find conditions that flood a scene with one color (fog, a single colored light, a green forest interior, blue hour). Because hue contrast is gone, your composition must rest on value — note where the lightest and darkest areas fall.

Part C — Warm, cool, and depth (Shoot This & Read the Frame)

Exercise 7.10 ⭐⭐ — The temperature pair. Repeat §7.3's field assignment formally. Photograph one subject twice: once against a cool background (distance, sky, shade) and once against a warm one (sunlit wall, autumn foliage, low sun). Keep both. Write which frame reads as deeper and which reads as warmer in feeling — and notice if they're different images.

Exercise 7.11 ⭐⭐ — Build depth with temperature. Make a single landscape or street frame that runs warm and saturated in the foreground to cool and desaturated in the background. Use the warm-advances/cool-recedes rule to make a scene feel deeper than it is. The park/trail location works well at golden hour. Compare it to a flat, single-temperature frame of the same view.

Exercise 7.12 ⭐⭐⭐ — Read the temperature of a frame. Below is a Described Photograph. Read it and answer: what is the dominant temperature, where is the depth cue working, and what one color change would you make and why?

FIGURE 7.E1 — "Diner at dusk"        [constructed teaching example]
  THE FRAME    Through a large window, a warm-lit diner interior glows orange; outside, the street and sky
               are deep blue dusk. A lone figure sits at the counter, lit warm. The window frame divides
               warm interior from cool exterior.
  THE LIGHT    Two sources: warm tungsten inside, cool blue ambient outside. The boundary runs right down
               the window glass.
  THE MOMENT   Still; the figure motionless over a cup.
  THE CHOICES  Shot from the cool street looking into the warm interior; exposed for the interior so the
               figure reads clearly; white balance left neutral.
  THE EFFECT   The warm island of the diner pops forward against the cool blue street.
  THE LESSON   ...

Write the missing THE LESSON line, name the harmony, and say whether you'd push white balance warmer or cooler and what it would gain or cost.

Part D — Color contrast and the dominant hue (Read the Frame & Recreate It)

Exercise 7.13 ⭐ — Spot the accent. Find five photographs (yours, a magazine, a feed) that use a single color accent in a dominant field. For each, name the dominant hue and the accent, and say which kind of contrast is at work: hue (opposite), saturation (intense vs. muted), or temperature (warm vs. cool).

Exercise 7.14 ⭐⭐ — Recreate the red door. Find your own "red door" — any single saturated subject set against a large, unified, desaturated field (grey wall, grey pavement, grey sky). Recreate Figure 7.6's approach: shoot under overcast light (which cools and desaturates everything but your saturated subject), give the neutral field most of the frame, and push white balance slightly cool. Keep it; it's a strong Portfolio candidate for this chapter.

Exercise 7.15 ⭐⭐ — The one-accent street frame. Go to your busy intersection. Make one dominant-hue street photograph: a field overwhelmingly one hue (or one desaturated neutral) broken by a single saturated accent — one red coat, one yellow sign, one green door. Work your feet until the accent sits alone in a clean part of the frame, nothing else competing. Shoot 20, keep 3.

Exercise 7.16 ⭐⭐⭐ — Saturation contrast with no complement. Deliberately make a frame whose accent is not the complement of the dominant field but pulls the eye anyway — a single saturated color in a desaturated (greyish, near-neutral) field. Prove to yourself that intensity alone, not opposition on the wheel, can carry the eye. Write why it works.

Part E — White balance as a creative choice (Settings Drill & Five Conditions)

Exercise 7.17 ⭐⭐ — Five white balances, one scene. Shoot the same still scene five times, changing only white balance: the cool preset ("Tungsten/ Incandescent"), neutral ("Daylight"), the warm presets ("Cloudy" then "Shade"), and Auto. (On a phone, drag the temperature slider cool → neutral → warm and include Auto.) Lay them out and pick the one that serves the feeling best — which is rarely the "accurate" one. Note the gap between "correct" and "best."

Exercise 7.18 ⭐ — Rescue the gold. Shoot a golden-hour or warm-lamp scene once on Auto white balance and once on a warmer manual setting (higher Kelvin / "Cloudy"/"Shade"). Compare: Auto likely neutralized the warmth; the manual setting kept it. Write the one-sentence rule you'll remember.

Exercise 7.19 ⭐⭐ — Settings drill: mixed light. You're shooting a portrait by a window at dusk: warm lamp on one side of the face, cool blue window light on the other, your subject's expression is the priority. Write the full approach — which light source you'd set white balance for and why, whether you'd shoot RAW, and what you'd accept going off-color. Explain the trade-off in two sentences.

Exercise 7.20 ⭐⭐⭐ — Two temperatures, two meanings. Take one neutral image (RAW is easiest) of a person or a room and produce two versions purely by white balance: a warm one and a cool one. Write the different story each tells (nostalgia/comfort vs. loneliness/clinical). Same pixels, two emotions, one slider. This is a preview of color grading (Chapter 27).

Part F — Simplifying the palette (Fix the Photo)

Exercise 7.21 ⭐⭐ — Subtract a color, four ways. Repeat §7.6's field assignment. Find a scene you like but that's too busy with color, and simplify the palette four ways without moving the subject: (1) re-frame to exclude a competing color; (2) get much closer; (3) wait for or seek more unifying light; (4) open the aperture wide to blur the colored background. Shoot 12+, keep the 3 cleanest, and say which method did the most work.

Exercise 7.22 ⭐⭐ — Fix the photo: the rainbow jumble. Diagnose and prescribe the re-shoot for this described failure:

A market stall photographed at harsh noon. The frame contains a red awning, a blue tarp, green produce,
yellow lemons, an orange sign, a purple bag, and a person in a pink shirt — at least six saturated hues, all
roughly equal in area and value. Composition and focus are fine. The image feels chaotic and the eye finds
nowhere to land.

Name the failure in color terms and write three concrete re-shoots that would simplify it (you may use light, distance, framing, depth of field, or conversion).

Exercise 7.23 ⭐⭐⭐ — The two-hue challenge. Make a photograph that contains only two hues of any consequence — everything else neutral or excluded. This is harder than it sounds and is the fastest way to learn palette discipline. Use re-framing, light, proximity, or blur to enforce the limit. Caption it with the two hues and the harmony they form.

Exercise 7.24 ⭐⭐ — When color should go entirely. Find one of your color photographs whose colors are chaotic but whose light, shape, and texture are strong. Argue in three sentences whether it would be stronger in black-and-white — i.e., whether the color is helping or merely distracting. (You'll actually make the conversion in Chapter 8; here, just make the judgment.)

Part G — Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

Exercise 7.25 ⭐⭐ — Color on a power point. Combine this chapter with Chapter 6. Make a dominant-hue image whose single color accent sits on a rule-of-thirds power point, so composition and color contrast point at the same spot. Note how much harder the eye is pulled when both tools agree.

Exercise 7.26 ⭐⭐ — Color + the right light. Combine with Chapter 5. Choose a color mood (warm/serene, or cool/melancholy) and then go find the hour and light that produces it — golden hour for warm, overcast or blue hour for cool. Prove that the color decision is really a light decision. Keep the strongest frame; log the light in your Light Log.

Exercise 7.27 ⭐⭐⭐ — Color + shallow focus. Combine with Chapter 4. Use a wide aperture to dissolve a busy, multicolored background into a soft wash of harmonious color behind a sharp subject. Prove that depth of field is also a palette tool: the same background, blurred, stops competing and starts supporting.

Exercise 7.28 ⭐ — Exposure protects color. Combine with Chapter 3. Photograph a saturated subject once correctly exposed and once overexposed by a stop or two. Watch the colors wash toward white as the highlights blow. Write the rule: to keep color rich, expose for (not above) the bright tones.

Stretch challenge

Exercise 7.29 ⭐⭐⭐ — A one-week color diet, one harmony. For seven days, make one photograph a day built on the same color harmony — pick one of the four and commit to it. By week's end, lay the seven together. You'll discover both how many ways one chord can be played and whether you're leaning on it as a crutch. Note your strongest and weakest day and why; bring the best frame to your Portfolio.

Exercise 7.30 ⭐⭐⭐ — The red-door color portrait of your neighborhood. Photograph one ordinary subject in your neighborhood — your own "red door" — as a deliberate color study the way the chapter did: a saturated subject against a unified, desaturated field, under light you chose for its color. Then write a full six-field Described Photograph of your result. You are practicing the book's core seeing device on your own work — the single best exercise for an editor's eye.

Model answers and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises appear in the book's "Answers to Selected Exercises." Attempt each with a camera before reading them — in color, especially, the eye learns by doing, not by being told.